I can’t help thinking that somewhere, Orlando Brown will sit down and watch this afternoon’s game between the only two teams he played for, the new Browns and the old Browns, better known as the Baltimore Ravens, during his 12-year NFL career as a bigger-than-life right tackle
“Zeus,” as he was nicknamed and known by, by one and all, has been gone just over four years, having died Sept. 23, 2011 of something called a diabetic ketoacidosis. It has to do with a condition brought on in diabetics by a lack of insulin.
Whatever the case, it must be powerful to have felled such a large man. And because it did in such a great man, I will forever hate it.
In having covered the Browns for over 25 years, Zeus is among the five most memorable, five most fascinating, five most favorite, five nicest and five most tragic figures I’ve run across among all the players and coaches I’ve met.
The size of his body was superseded only by the size of his heart, and that’s saying a lot because Zeus was one big dude.
It was the spring of 1993, a week after the NFL Draft, and I was standing in the Browns locker room at team headquarters in Berea with Jeff Schudel, who has covered the club for the News-Herald in Lake County since 1981. We watched as the rookie free agents signed by Browns head coach Bill Belichick – the best of the bunch of the players who were not drafted – paraded through the room in single-file fashion.
As with most rookie free agents, they were virtual nobodies. Back then, in the days before the advent of Al Gore’s worldwide web and the proliferation of college football telecasts by all kinds of over-the-air and cable networks, you didn’t know who the long-snapper was for the Utah Utes, or the backup quarterback for Boston College Eagles. Nor did you care to know them.
And these young men were players of that ilk – nobodies trying to become somebodies by beating the odds and winning NFL roster spots.
They were all shapes and sizes, with all kinds of complexions and every hairstyle under the sun, at least with what we knew early in the days of the Clinton – Bill, that is, — administration.
After a while, they all began looking the same as they passed by us.
Then, just as Jeff and I thought we had seen all – and who – there was to see, we caught sight of something, er, someone, who appeared to be an optical illusion. He was so much bigger than all the rest – and some of them were pretty big, mind you – that it, er he didn’t seem real.
He was very tall, very heavy and very wide.
“What was that?!” Schudel asked me almost in shouting fashion, even though I was only a few feet away.
Not “Who was that?”, but “What was that?”
I had no answer. I am rarely speechless, but I definitely was at that moment.
Indeed, with shoulders seemingly as wide as Jeff and I were tall, and a large Afro that looked as if it might brush up against the ceiling as he sauntered on by, bouncing back and forth from the left to the right and back again as he walked, he was an incredible sight.
It, er, he looked like a 747 cruising by on its, er, his descent into. or takeoff from, Hopkins Airport, located only five minutes away.
I had never personally seen such a big human being in my life, and haven’t seen one that big since.
Here’s how it works in the NFL: When a player first enters the league, he is given an official height and weight, and no matter how much he may change physically over the duration of his career, even if it’s 15 years, his official size never changes.
Because Zeus was put onto the Injured Reserve list in 1993 for some fictitious, Belichick-concocted injury and spent the whole year trying to round his body into shape – there was no weight room at his tiny, historic all-black college of South Carolina State – he was not “assigned” his forever height and weight until 1994, when he actually made the roster and began playing for the Browns. He was listed at 6-foot-7, and he was every bit of that and perhaps even more, and 360 pounds.
While that sounds like a lot of weight, and may have been what he was in 1994, it absolutely was not what he was that day he arrived at Browns Headquarters in 1993. By best estimates, before Zeus started to shed his baby fat, he was 385 pounds. At least.
As such, he was, by the combination of height and weight, the biggest player in Browns history. And he still is.
Jeff made the mistake one time in 1993 of asking Belichick if Zeus was bigger than fellow rookie Herman Arvie, nicknamed “RV,” a fifth-round draft choice out of another historic all-black school, Grambling. A right tackle as well, sprinkled in with some time at guard, Arvie was sizable in his own right at 6-4 and 325 pounds.
When Belichick heard the question, he just snickered.
“You could put Herman Arvie inside of Orlando Brown,” he said with a wide smile.
And Belichick was right.
Zeus was also a great storyteller, and there were never any tall tales that he told to any member of the media who cared to listen – and we all cared to listen. He was from Washington, D.C. – a real bad part of town – and as such while growing up was sent each summer by his mother to his grandmother’s big farm in South Carolina so he could lend a hand with the chores and at the same time avoid all the drugs, violence and no good back home.
He said that even though his grandmother was just a tiny woman, he feared her more than any NFL defensive end or outside linebacker because she wouldn’t hesitate taking the switch to his behind if she felt he needed a little prodding and/or a a dose of discipline.
Zeus would interject into parts of each story a big helping of his hearty laugh. He was one of those guys whose laugh was so good that it made you laugh as well whenever you heard it.
Zeus went with the original Browns when they relocated to Baltimore following the 1995 season, but returned to the new Browns in their expansion year of 1999. At the end of that season, he was hit in the eye with the weighted end of a penalty flag thrown by an official – a real bizarre incident if there ever was one — and sued anybody and everybody he felt was responsible for it. He eventually returned to the Ravens for three years to finish his career.
When the Browns would play the Ravens when he was still with them, Zeus would always seek out members of the Cleveland media after the game, saying how much he liked us and missed us before he gave us a big hug. When you were bearhugged by Zeus, you felt as if you were five years old and were getting hugged by that uncle who worked in the steel mill, or was a blacksmith, or had traveled with the circus as the resident giant. That hug just swallowed you up.
I loved Orlando Brown like my “little” brother, and what I wouldn’t do for one of his loving hugs right now.
God rest your soul, Zeus.
And enjoy today’s game. Keep in mind that whatever happens this afternoon, your team will win.
I can just hear him now laughing about that. And I listen real hard, I could probably hear that laugh.
And yes, the thought of that has, in this moment, caused me to laugh.
You’ve still got it, Zeus.
*
Here are a few more stories about Orlando Brown that didn’t necessarily fit into the story:
*The game-winning play in the new Browns’ first victory ended with all kinds of people lying on the turf of the Superdome on Oct. 31, 1999. Thank goodness the officials didn’t see how one of them got there, or else the Browns’ celebration never would have happened. It might have been a wake instead.
The expansion Browns were 0-7 as they met the New Orleans Saints. They were trailing 16-14 when quarterback Tim Couch threw a 56-yard Hail Mary touchdown pass to wide receiver Kevin Johnson as time expired to provide a 21-16 victory. Johnson caught the ball in the lower right corner of the end zone, just barely over the goal line, and then fell down. A number of his teammates immediately piled on top of him to whoop it up. At the same time, Saints head coach Mike Ditka, stunned that he had let his club lose at home to a winless expansion team, immediately hit the deck as if he had been shot and laid on his pack, looking up at the Superdome ceiling. As it turned out, his job began slipping away from him at that point.
Also flat on his back was a Saints rusher in the Cleveland backfield, not far from where Couch released his pass. He had beaten Brown on his pass rush and, just as he began to close in on Couch for what would have been the victory-clinching sack, Brown tackled him like a ball-carrier. When you look up offensive holding in the NFL dictionary, there is a picture of Brown dragging his man down.
Fortunately, the officials did not see Brown’s handiwork, for if they had, they would have penalized him, negating the touchdown. Browns head coach Chris Palmer, who was chomping at the bit to get a win, was about half the size of Brown, but he would have beaten him to a pulp.
*When Brown came to the Browns the first time in the Belichick era, he heard all about the team’s rivalry with the Pittsburgh Steelers and that he had better be prepared for a real battle. He politely listened to the well-intentioned words of wisdom, but he didn’t take them to heart. He didn’t get it, and wasn’t interested in trying to get it.
But he said it wasn’t far into his first game against Pittsburgh, on Sept. 11, 1994 at Cleveland Stadium in the Week 2 of the season, that he began to fully understand what everybody was talking about.
As Brown put it, Steelers defensive end Kevin Henry grabbed him by his … uh, well, … manhood and dragged him along the line of scrimmage.
Indeed, that was holding of a different nature. And like Brown’s own misdeed against the Saints, it wasn’t called by the officials
“Man, I couldn’t believe it,” Brown said with that hearty laugh of his. “I had never had that done to me.”
Not many people have.
*When he returned to the Browns in 1999, Brown, from his days with the Ravens, continued to live in an affluent suburban Baltimore neighborhood. The people who resided next door had a cat they dearly loved. One day the cat got loose and as (bad) luck would have it, Brown accidentally ran over it with his big SUV while returning home late one evening.
Brown panicked like a murderer with blood on his hands, and his tires. He and his wife really liked those neighbors and he didn’t want to break their hearts.
So he gathered up the cat’s body, put it into the back of his vehicle, and placed it onto the grass between the two homes. The next morning, he very conspicuously walked over to the cat, then went to the neighbors’ house and told them what he had “found.” He convinced them that the cat had gotten mauled by a mean attack cat in the neighborhood.
